Make symbiosis, not war. (This is about business.)

By Jesús Ramírez and Paul Goya

Culture your brand. Culture your business. Culture your cause. Culture your media. That is what has been fermenting in the world of business since the advent of the internet — since the advent of mass connectivity and omnidirectional communication. Behemoths that have slowly and carefully cultured their companies are now reaping the rewards of understanding this organic growth theory.

Culture the Media. What’s in your petri dish?

The war narrative of marketing (strategy, target, positioning) is simmering. This zero-sum approach will continue to work in rare instances but traditional monologue marketing will be the exception in the coming years.

Most businesses, even the profitable ones are unhealthy. They are silos of insight. Unfortunately, they are about to be surprised by the future. In a world of new media like Medium, their monologue is and will continue to be drowned out. Money-drenched marketing is increasingly less effective and when it is, the results are temporary unless fed again. Sure “ecosystem” is the new buzz word. While there is much truth and value in understanding ecosystems, most professionals don’t have the patience or the gut for it. They want the fast pill. They want the illusion of success.

Culturing is how you start ecosystems. There is no fast and artificial way to make a sustainable culture. There is no artificial yeast for this. You must create a medium and feed your nascent culture the way I am feeding Medium right now. You must find a way to attract prosumers who come to you because they are both selfish and altruistic at the same time. You must generate an autopoietic system that healthily grows your culture. You do this by creating a product that augments the lives of others. These beneficiaries of your product create byproducts that improve the lives of yet others, a win-win-win. By transferring DNA back and forth (mutating) through the entire connected ecosystem, this strengthens your medium and your business or cause. Forget seeking out a “viral” solution. Viruses usually kill their hosts. Instead, obey nature and strengthen your immunity for the longer symbiosis. Symbiosis is the oldest living game plan in the history of the world. It has always been.

I invite collaborators and naysayers alike to help Paul Goya and I usher in this new abiotic and symbiotic Culturing Media petri dish narrative. Culturing is a very large and far-reaching idea. Its time has come. I invite marketers, new biologists, immunologists, chemists, sociologists, information theorists, physicists, applied mathematicians, network theorists, microbiologists, conspiracy theorists, midwives, futurists, etc to help cultivate this.

In these real-time, connected, unscripted, hyper-contextual and cultural times Jesus Ramirez and Paul Goya propose a theory of Culturing Media to usher in a new form for growing brands, causes, cures, business and much more.